Jonathan Meades showed a different side to the TOWIE county in The Joy Of Essex (Picture: BBC)

TV review: Jonathan Meades’ The Joy Of Essex showed a side to the county beyond the worlds of reality TV – which made for daring TV thanks to Meades’ eccentric commentary.

If this was a court of law, I’d have to declare an interest. At one point in Jonathan Meades: The Joy Of Essex (BBC4), my house popped up on screen. I don’t think I was in, otherwise I would have waved.

But don’t go thinking I’m going to give Meades an easy ride, just because he gave me the architectural once over. Unless his effort to reclaim my home county from the ‘reality TV creations barely capable of reading their own newspaper columns’ and ‘surgically enhanced slappers’ – his delightfully acid words – came up to scratch, such pictorial flattery would count for nought.

Happily, up to scratch, with claws dipped in extravagant bile, is what his eloquently eccentric film certainly was. Though it began as a ritual slaughter of the TOWIE generation, Meades soon put away such childish things and set about a fascinating cruise – in a silver Toyota, obviously – down the backroads of Essex’s quirky history.

There was a touch of master film-maker Adam Curtis about the way Meades criss-crossed his connecting points. From the bucolic philanthropy of the cults that sprang up in Essex a century ago, where the likes of Theodore Faithfull (grandfather of Marianne) used a Frigidity Machine to liberate libidoes to ‘the aggressively genteel yet strangely delightful resort of Frinton-on-Sea’, Meades painted a portrait of a much-maligned land that was a world away from popular perception.

There were false notes. Idiot interludes from a chortling local radio chappie were funny the first few times but outstayed their welcome. Worse, they were fictional – the real thing is actually worse. And at times, Meades let his language flower so fervently it was tricky to track his syntax. But, for the most part, this was daring TV, boldly moulding the medium to its own message, painting pictures in words with beguiling images used as punctuation.

Most of all, though, The Joy Of Essex felt liberating: cry, beloved county, no more. Oliver Hill, modernist architect and keen naturist, gave us a flash on a balcony, bless him, and the film felt drenched in the spirit of cheeky sunbathing. Watch out from the train window next time, you never know what you might see.